Author’s note on Harold Pratt House

HAROLD PRATT HOUSE, 58 E 68th STREET, NYC.

With the Internet’s explosion, promoting a raft of conspiracy theories, the term ‘New World Order’ has recently come to prominence.

Some contributors hold it responsible for everything from the Wall Street crash to the death of John F. Kennedy, and from the scourge of international terrorism to the military interventions of George W. Bush.

Others, with eyebrows pointedly raised, will direct our confusion to a fourteen-point speech by Woodrow Wilson, and claim hysteria based on misinterpretation.

Many point accusing fingers at the curiously-ennobled Colonel Edward Mandell House; Woodrow Wilson’s chief adviser, and some say alter ego, and to his brainchild The Council on Foreign Relations.

They claim The CFR to be the insidious public persona of a clandestine New World Order; perhaps the only ‘open-secret society’ ever devised by Machiavellian man.

Those same fingers of accusation will then direct us to New York City, and an innocuous limestone-clad mansion on the corner of East 68th Street and Park Avenue.

Still retained as the headquarters of the CFR today, Harold Pratt House is a building largely ignored by the millions of sightseers, day-trippers, and wide-eyed celebrity hunters who religiously trawl Park Avenue.

It is a building admired by those who gather to witness the solemnity of marriage within its confines, and dismissed by those who blithely negotiate the passing traffic in front of that same innocuous façade.

And yet for those who believe, and stand tall in the face of establishment scorn and media denigration, it is a building considered to be every bit as significant in the creation of modern world history as the Moscow Kremlin or Berlin Reichstag.